Nassim Taleb on Living a Good Life in an Age of Volatility

Every day we're inundated with headlines that are seemingly unbelievable. Multiple major wars are ongoing. Politics is erratic. Markets are scrambling everyone's brains. So how should we live and feel good? How should we think about the world around us, and the various perceived risks out there. In yet another episode from our live Odd Lots special in New York City last month, we speak with famed author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the scientific advisor at Universa Investments, who shares his perspective on all things. Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

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  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 1:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello, Odd Lots listeners. You are listening to another episode that was recorded live in New York City at our event on June 26th. This time it's with the one and only Nassim Nicholas Taleb, distinguished scientist and advisor at Universa Investments.

• 1:19Tracy Alloway?

  Yep, we talked to him about how to live a good life in a time of immense volatility. Take a listen. Nassim, what's your definition of a good life? What should we be aiming for?

• 1:32Speaker 05

  I mean, the lot of people think that we're programmed to be happy and stuff like that. In fact, we're programmed to feel useful. That's a good life. Or, I mean, you don't have to be martyr to feel useful. As a matter of fact, martyrs go too far. And if you look at their deaths typically in history, you realize it could have waited a decade and the problem was solved itself by itself, right? So think of all the wars and hey, like the Vietnam War, it took care of itself or whatever. So. So let's forget about martyrdom, except of course in narrow cases where you save someone. So the idea is to be useful to others.

• 2:14Speaker 05

  And then the idea is, you know, to share your mistakes as you grow in age, to share your mistakes with society, so they can build on it. That's my idea of a good life. For a lot of people, good life is hedonic, in the sense that they have a chef flown in from Europe to eat some complicated food that our friend here, you know, would not approve, really, you know, non-stakes, complicated things with loud names. And so that's the hedonic approach to things. Mine is you feel useful. So whether you have a family and you're providing for them, or if for a lot of people who don't have a family yet, or may not have a family,

• 2:57Speaker 05

  because in the past, most people didn't have a family. A lot of people were orphans, a lot of people had children who didn't survive. So the idea is to be useful to the community in general.

• 3:11Joe Weisenthal?

  So we talked about this in the market context at the very beginning. But does, you know, I feel this pull to basically always look at my phone, to monitor the latest headlines. Sometimes I don't think like I'm the best parent because I'm looking at my phone when I should be with my family, as you mentioned. How do we be useful?

• 3:32Speaker 05

  We're better off.

• 3:33Joe Weisenthal?

  In a time where we're just being bombarded with events beyond our control.

• 3:39Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah, but you're, we're better off than we were today, 40 years, 50 years ago, before many were born, maybe perhaps even you, all right?

• 3:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 05

  So you don't realize that we spent about a century in front of a TV set. Or reading papers where you're on a receiving end. But not providing anything in return. So it was a centralized information era that started, you know, with modernity. And you realize, you should see the families eating the dinner in front of the TV set. Basically, you're receiving information. Whereas organically, in the past, the way we dealt with information was by trading it. It's like Twitter. You give information, you receive information. So you go to the barber, someone gives you information, and then you go to buy fish.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  You give the fishmonger information, and then rumors start going. So, and now we're close to that period. Because you're not just receiving stuff, you're also tweeting, you know. So although your spouse, I'm sure, tells you not to tweet from home.

• 4:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Not thrilled, that's correct, yeah, that's correct.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 4:50Tracy Alloway?

  It is true, when we're trying to get Joe's attention, we send a DM.

• 4:54Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 4:54Tracy Alloway?

  Because he doesn't respond to anything else.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  So I'm sure he's tweeting, so you're feeling you're not just receiving noise, but you're creating noise.

• 5:00Joe Weisenthal?

  So I'm contributing, I'm being useful by contributing to the noise. Thank you.

• 5:03Speaker 05

  So.

• 5:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you, very validating.

• 5:04Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, but do you personally enjoy being on Twitter? Because I read some of your tweets, and, you know, sometimes you seem a little angry.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  No, so.

• 5:12Tracy Alloway?

  Just a little.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  I were tweeting now in front of all of you.

• 5:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Speaker 05

  The tweet would look angry, but my face.

• 5:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, actually.

• 5:23Speaker 05

  I'm often giggling when I'm tweeting, all right? I'm often giggling. So the idea is to separate your public persona from your private life.

• 5:34Joe Weisenthal?

  By the way, before we forget, before you leave tonight, someone DM'd me and said, "Can you please ask Nassim to unblock me on Twitter?"

• 5:41Speaker 05

  I get these all the time.

• 5:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, no.

• 5:43Speaker 05

  That's probably the most frequent message.

• 5:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Remind me before you leave, it seemed like a nice guy.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  They all say, "Oh, sorry, I had a drink," or "I don't know."

• 5:51Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, we should actually ask.

• 5:52Speaker 05

  Because of Bitcoin, because I chain-blocked.

• 5:54Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  When you have a smear campaign, you chain-block.

• 5:57Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Speaker 05

  So the friends, if someone bullies you, or you block their friends as well.

• 6:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  It was possible at the time.

• 6:08Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, how many people here have been personally blocked by Nassim Taleb?

• 6:15Speaker 05

  Not that many. That's not nothing. Not that many. It's not a small number.

• 6:19Joe Weisenthal?

  It's not none, though.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  Because, no, no, no.

• 6:21Joe Weisenthal?

  A random room in New York.

• 6:22Speaker 05

  I stopped, I stopped about a couple of years ago from using the chain blocker.

• 6:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Speaker 05

  One, because it had a lot of type 2 error, that the, the, the false positives. And the other reason is because when Elon took Twitter, he banned these bots.

• 6:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  So, so they can't operate anymore. You've got to do it manually.

• 6:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Like the third-party apps that you can use.

• 6:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. They could use to block someone, their friends, the friends of their friends, the friends of friends of friends, and all of that to yourself.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Rees, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 7:25Speaker 06

  We're seeing a lot of institutional players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high-frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service institutional clients.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says.

• 7:41Speaker 07

  A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

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• 9:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Are you surprised that in a year of just unbelievable headlines, seemingly day after day, multiple wars going on, not to mention the trade war and all of that, everything else, Doge, etc., that the markets are not crazier than they are?

• 9:49Speaker 05

  Let me compose a tweet that maybe I'll post. Is for Trump I, okay, Trump I was taken literally by his enemies, by his, and metaphorically by his friends. Trump II is taken metaphorically by his enemies and literally by his friends.

• 10:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Explain.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  So whatever he's saying now, he's pretty much doing. Did you believe that he was gonna start these tariffs? They make no sense. I mean, it makes sense to get elected in Pennsylvania, but I mean, it's not the kind of thing you do, really. And it turned out, he meant it. It was not just, you know...

• 10:33Speaker 05

  A vague, it's really an ordinary metaphor, it was real, he wants tariffs. So maybe he wants to destroy the American economy, maybe that's his wish and you could probably put a dent.

• 10:46Joe Weisenthal?

  And yet, but it's not work, where's the stock market at all time high?

• 10:49Speaker 05

  Sorry?

• 10:50Joe Weisenthal?

  The stock market is at all time high.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  First of all, you have to separate the health of American companies.

• 10:54Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I get that, but you're, I get that, but you're true.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  The income of the American who went to Stop and Shop, or was this thing in your area? Not Whole Foods, you guys go to Whole Foods, but normal people go to Costco, whatever, then you look at your bill, right? And, and the bill went up practically for everything. And their income did not, and tax breaks to come are not gonna help those who don't shop at Whole Foods. Because it's the, the, the poor people, you don't pay taxes anyway, so, so not gonna get a break from that. So the, the idea is, there's a lunacy in, in these tariffs. I can understand that we need to protect pharma. We have some strategic interest in this, okay, you protect the industry.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  You wanna make sure you don't depend on China for other things. But it, it's a lunacy to try to switch with 4% unemployment in America, plus or minus, from high margin, I mean, you guys are all hard margin, all right, to low margin, all right?

• 11:59Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a high margin audience.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, we have a high margin audience, to low margin, all right, occupations. So now we're gonna make socks, can you imagine the high margin, so they're making, so they're making films, we're gonna make socks. And, and then also misperception is the whole process of a lot of things in, in, in basic, you know, trade accounting. Like they say, oh, they're ripping us off, I mean, I'm a dentist, all right? And I go buy my bread, it's ripping me off, right? I should make my own bread, and, and then the bread, the baker should be a dentist. So the, the whole, the whole idea is not, it, it doesn't stand on, and then plus they have,

• 12:43Speaker 05

  you, you know, if someone is not very intelligent or not very skilled. And you can detect that at, it's like arbitrages. You guys are from financial audience. And we call that trading against themselves. They do a series of trades that end up being closing a loop, being circular, but was a loss. All right. They used to call that Texas trades, but I think that the state of Texas has been unfairly, you know.

• 13:09Joe Weisenthal?

  The Texas hedge.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, Texas, Texas trades in general. One of them is Texas hedge, right? So the, so for example, they have tariffs on components that you would use to build a computer in your basement in New York. Okay. But if you bought an Apple product, then there's no tariff, although that's made in, everything's made overseas. Manufacturers, okay? So this is an inconsistency. So there are plenty like that.

• 13:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure.

• 13:40Speaker 05

  And there's also, what's his name? The Secretary of Treasury is like, Secretary of, not Treasury, Secretary of Commerce.

• 13:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Lot.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  Is, yeah, he, he, he definitely, someone should hire him for comedy because he was saying, first of all, he asked, he, he, he, he doesn't, the inconsistency. He didn't realize, he said, oh, we're gonna raise so much money from tariffs. And, and, and then when you ask him, you mean that the economy will not adapt to your tariffs by, by replacement? He didn't think about it. And, and, and he wants us to produce to pay tariffs on bananas, uh, so we're gonna have substitutes. Or he spoke about wine. He said, oh, people will buy American wine. But what happens if French, the price of French wine goes up? Okay. There's something called substitution. I don't know if people do that in, in Europe, they teach high school economics.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  I mean, for children, where they teach them substitution, right? So it's elementary. I mean, I'm saying that he, Trump should have hired, if you, if you could find, people who have some skills. All right.

• 14:45Tracy Alloway?

  I can't wait to develop my skills growing my own bananas. Banana artaki, artaki, sorry, I can't talk tonight. Okay. I was gonna ask, you always preach skin in the game.

• 14:57Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 14:58Tracy Alloway?

  Unlike us journalists. So, I gotta ask, you're still an advisor to Universa. What's been going on there? What are your returns like? Give us all the numbers.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  Okay, no, I, so this is not the place to discuss numbers.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  You won't get, right? But you can get a general approach and philosophy that I have now to describe in a in a format, a compressed format of what we do and how we do it.

• 15:31Speaker 05

  We can safely say that, as usual, whatever we're doing worked. Okay? In a sense that the idea, the idea, let me tell you, the idea, the idea is that you gotta look at the return of that hedge. You gotta return of the portfolio that was hedged. Because sort of like when you, when you have an insurance on your house, all right? You look at the package, house plus insurance. You don't look at insurance as a tradable thing. Today, I'm not gonna have insurance, tomorrow I'll have, or how is that paying on? You look at the package, okay? Insurance allows you to buy a bigger house. Because you know your, your total risk is lower, in case of stuff like that. So it's the same situation. And, and the stock market rallied.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  Which, which mean that not only did the hedge do okay, but it wasn't needed. So you're like making money on your insurance. So net-net, that story continued. And we've been doing it now for, time flies, we're in 2025. Twenty-five minus, oh, that's a lot, right? So we've done it for eighteen years. Nineteen, nineteen years. Directly with Universa and before, of course, an iteration before. And it is, it's the same story. We didn't change strategy for a second. And we will not change strategy. So basically, that's what we do, it's the same thing. It's just that it's getting bigger, that's it.

• 17:01Tracy Alloway?

  Well, wait, there are a lot more volatility events nowadays. Do you not adapt to that at all? Or take that into account?

• 17:08Speaker 05

  Okay, so let me tell you, if you look net-net, first of all, I don't look at volatility as volatility.

• 17:13Tracy Alloway?

  Okay.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  In, in my technical work, and Universa doesn't look at vol, you look at For example, you can have a tail event, and then you can have, or you can have regular volatility. So a lot of people are overwhelmed by regular volatility. And typically, what they call regular volatility, I learned the linguistics of that business, is when the market goes down. They don't, in the old days, when they're losing money, they would say, oh, the markets are volatile. Volatile doesn't mean it's going up. Volatile is not an absolute mean deviation. Volatile is negative return, all right? So, so a lot of perception of things, of volatility, by exact, I mean, your profession as a journalist is of course very important. That way you can reveal

• 17:57Speaker 05

  bad stuff when it's made and things like that.

• 18:01Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, didn't Nassim just say something nice about journalism?

• 18:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, there are a lot of things. It's an important mission. But, but, but very often, there's, the scaling doesn't, doesn't quite match. Like, for example, people in journalism. And this, I wrote about, and fooled by randomness. You should have newspapers, the length of newspapers. Now, we don't have newspapers, but you understand what I mean. There should be on days like the stock market crash or on last couple of weeks, newspapers should be that big, and the rest of the time should be half a page. But they have the same length, all right? So that's the scaling problem in journalism. In other words, you have the news fourteen and a half minutes plus, you know, of course, the Bloomberg ad in the middle.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  So, so the, I mean, that news bulletin should be variable with, with, with the events. You see the idea? So same thing with market movement. So I don't think that we are experiencing the real volatility compared to what could have happened and what we have seen with explosive markets, yes.

• 19:07Joe Weisenthal?

  So, as mentioned, multiple wars going on. We had the COVID shock. We had the inflation shock. We have massive changes happening in the political landscape, including right here in New York City. Is there an underlying reason, in your view, why it feels as though big things are happening?

• 19:30Speaker 05

  No, that, that, my whole point is that, what, to go back to,

• 19:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Or it's just perception?

• 19:35Speaker 05

  Go back to tail, to what we call about fat tail. Fat tail means the smallest number of event explains the largest number. Of deviations. For example, if you take a thousand people and you have inequality, one person will have most of the money. Likewise, few historical days have most of the information. Likewise, so this is entirely normal. But the point is, you can't, you can predict ahead of time that you're gonna have, when you're gonna have these days, or you're gonna have. The structure of it is though, very, very stable. It is, things follow, tend to follow a power law. So.

• 20:16Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, I'm gonna ask a very basic question that I'm sure you get asked all the time, but we are all nevertheless very interested in your answer. By definition, black swans, I guess, are unpredictable and impossible to forecast. But what black swans do you see on the horizon?

• 20:32Speaker 05

  Okay, so. You love this question.

• 20:34Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  Let me rephrase, let me rephrase it, okay? There's something called gray swans, all right? So pandemics were gray swans. Or, you know, gray swans means events that have these characteristics of very small number of events, determine large part of the total effect, like small, a small number of events, a small number of wars that killed most of those people, stuff like that, pandemics. So there's gray swans. And you can say they have a structure. You predict them ahead of time, you don't know, okay? But we do, as you can figure out, if an environment is fragile or not. And in a fragile environment,

• 21:18Speaker 05

  you can say, okay, this is prone to break if there's a shock. Like in 2007, we knew that the banks were fragile. Why? Well, there were net short volatility. That's sort of my fragilities work and anti-fragile. To answer your question, I wrote anti-fragile, which on its own became a monster, right? But, but the, the whole idea is to figure out what can be, have cascading effect from shocks, okay? As I wrote to the black swan. It's foolish to say what color truck is gonna break a fragile bridge. Okay, but it is not foolish to say this bridge is fragile, it's gonna break one day. Don't cross it.

• 22:00Speaker 05

  Or invite your enemies to.

• 22:04Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, okay, what areas of fragility do you see right now?

• 22:08Speaker 05

  So, the first one is.

• 22:10Tracy Alloway?

  I'm learning.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  Okay, so.

• 22:13Joe Weisenthal?

  What's fragile, yeah?

• 22:14Speaker 05

  The first one is, we have a, I don't know if you're aware of it, maybe people aren't aware yet. That, I don't know, we know we have a deficit.

• 22:23Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, I heard about this.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  And you know that you have to borrow, you know, to pay for the interest rates, for the interest, you know, the debt that you've had before. And at four, north of 4% interest rates, 4% to 5% interest rate, this is significant. It means you can have a snowballing effect, you had to borrow more and more. And you know that they're not fixing the budget problem, except verbally. Hey, we're gonna fix the budget, it's all the same story. The structure of the political system unfortunately is driving us there, okay? So this is one source of fragility, one main source of fragility, okay? Is that the political system is not adapted to that kind of thing.

• 23:10Speaker 05

  So what happened in the Western world? It's not just the case of the United States. It's a case of the Western world, because you gotta look at it as a scrub and anti-fragile. Think of an S curve. Like China can have rapid growth because they're pulling people out of their beautifully landscaped countryside to put them in apartment blocks. That maybe it's not pleasant for the people, you know, to live in boxes, but that generates a huge amount of economic growth, okay? So, a lot of people going up the so-called development scale, you're on the convex part of the S curve, okay? The West is on the concave part of the S curve. So which means that.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  You have two car, most, except New Yorkers live in small boxes like, like, like poor people in Middle Ages, but outside New York City, and a real, most people have two car garages, stuff like that. So you, you, you, we can't, you can't grow, right? And you don't have poor people, so you have to import them from El Salvador, Panama, a lot of people, you don't have poor people. So, so you don't, to create that kind of thing. And, and, and even, and now you don't want them anymore. You don't, they don't want, you know, everybody, you know. So, so we have a problem, is that growth in America is structurally declining. Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  Well, at the same time, the debt burden is structurally increasing. You see that inversion? And that applies to the rest of the developed world. Because you've developed, you're arriving to destination. Why are you still borrowing? The problem is, most countries tend to borrow when they're already rich, when they don't need it anymore. Just like people. See, like people on Wall Street, these people are on Wall Street, they probably borrow a lot. Now they're already rich, all right? Whereas poor people don't borrow. So that's a big problem. That's number one problem. The second one is, China is representing a larger, larger share of GDP of the world. And so you're going to think that geopolitics

• 25:13Speaker 05

  aren't going to be the same. And you don't want to live, you know, in the wrong century. Think you're living in this century, think you're in a different century.

• 25:22Tracy Alloway?

  All right, Nassim Tilab. Yeah, thank you so much.

• 25:26Speaker 05

  Thanks, thanks for inviting me. And thanks for the steak. So next time, let's make sure either have organ food or bring wine.

• 25:35Joe Weisenthal?

  We'll definitely, we'll definitely have wine. Thank you so much.

• 25:42Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 25:47Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at TheStalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kell Brooks at Kell Brooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about These topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/odlons.

• 26:09Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we do these live recordings, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.

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